Admission Control in Networks with Advance Reservations

Abstract

The provisioning of quality-of-service for real-time network applications may require the network to reserve resources. A natural way to do this is to allow advance reservations of network resources prior to the time they are needed. We consider several two-dimensional admission control problems in simple topologies such as a line and a tree. The input is a set of connection requests, each specifying its spatial characteristics, that is, its source and destination; its temporal characteristics, that is, its start time and duration time; and, potentially, also a bandwidth requirement. In addition, each request is associated with a profit gained by accommodating it. We address the related admission control problem, where the goal is to maximize the total profit gained by the accommodated requests. We provide approximation algorithms for several problem variations. Our results imply a 4c-approximation algorithm for finding a maximum weight independent set of axis-parallel rectangles in the plane, where c is the size of a maximum set of overlapping rectangles.